I passed by quickly, pretending not to notice lest--after all--I should

be done out of my _Essentials of Histology._ Even in the Library I very

nearly let the opportunity slide by picking up a book on squaring the

circle, the preface and introduction of which I was forced to read.

_March_ 4.

_The Entomological Society_

There were a great many Scarabees present who exhibited to one another

poor little pinned insects in collecting-boxes ... It was really a

one-man show, Prof. Poulton, a man of very considerable scientific

attainments, being present, and shouting with a raucous voice in a way

that must have scared some of the timid, unassuming collectors of our

country's butterflies and moths. Like a great powerful sheep-dog, he got

up and barked, "Mendelian characters," or "Germ plasm," what time the

obedient flock ran together and bleated a pitiful applause. I suppose,

having frequently heard these and similar phrases fall from the lips of

the great man at these reunions, they have come to regard them as

symbols of a ritual which they think it pious to accept without any

question. So every time the Professor says, "Allelomorph," or some such

phrase, they cross themselves and never venture to ask him what the hell

it is all about.

_March_ 7.

_A Scots Fir_

Have been feeling very "down" of late, but yesterday I saw a fine Scots

Fir by the roadside--tall, erect, as straight as a Parthenon pillar. The

sight of it restored my courage. It had a tonic effect. Quite

unconsciously I pulled my shoulders back and walked ahead with renewed

vows never to flinch again. It is a noble tree. It has strength as a

giant, and a giant's height, and yet kindly withal, the branches

drooping down graciously towards you--like a kind giant extending its

hands to a child.

_March_ 22.

_A Stagnant Day_

Went to bed late last night so I slept on soundly till 9 a.m. Went down

to the bath-room, but found the door was shut, so went back to my

bedroom again, lay down and dosed a while, thinking of nothing in

particular. Went down again--door still locked--swore--returned once

more to my room and reclined on the bed, with door open, so that I could

hear as soon as the bath-room door opened.... Rang the bell, and

Miss ---- brought up a jug of hot water to shave with, and a tumbler of hot

water to drink (for my dyspepsia). She, on being interrogated, said

there was some one in the bath-room. I said I wanted a bath too, so as

she passed on her way down she shouted, "Hurry up, Mr. Barbellion wants

a bath as well." Her footsteps then died away as she descended lower

into the basement, where the family lives, sleeps, and cooks our food.

At length, hearing the door open, I ejaculated, "the Lord be praised,"

rushed down, entered the bath-room and secured it from further

intruders. I observed that Miss ---- senior had been bathing her members,

and that the bath, tho' empty, was covered inside with patches of soap

--unutterably black! Oh! Miss ----!

Dressed leisurely and breakfasted. When the table was cleared wrote a

portion of my essay on _Spallanzani_....

Then, being giddy and tired, rang for dinner. Miss ---- laid the table.

She looked very clean. I said, "Good-morning," and she suitably replied,

and I went on reading, the _Winning Post_. Felt too slack to be amiable.

Next time she came in, I said as pleasantly as I could, "Is it all

ready?" and being informed proceeded to eat forthwith.

In the afternoon, took a 'bus to Richmond. No room outside, so had to go

inside--curse--and sit opposite a row--curse again--of fat, ugly,

elderly women, all off to visit their married daughters, the usual

Sunday jaunt. At Hammersmith got on the outside, and at Turnham Green

was caught in a hail storm. Very cold all of a sudden, so got off and

took shelter in the doorway of a shop, which was of course closed, the

day being Sunday. Rain, wind, and hail continued for some while, as I

gazed at the wet, almost empty street, thinking, re-thinking and

thinking over again the same thought, viz., that the 'bus ride along

this route was exceptionally cheap--probably because of competition with

the trams.

The next 'bus took me to Richmond. Two young girls sat in front, and

kept looking back to know if I was "game." I looked _through_ them.

Walked in the Park just conscious of the singing of Larks and the

chatter of Jays, but harassed mentally by the question, "To whom shall I

send my essay, when finished?" To shelter from the rain sat under an oak

where four youths joined me and said, "Worse luck," and "Not half," and

smoked cigarettes. They gossipped and giggled like girls, put their arms

around each other's necks. At the dinner last night, they said, they had

Duck and Tomato Soup and Beeswax ("Beesley, you know, the chap that goes

about with Smith a lot") wore a fancy waistcoat with a dinner jacket.

When I got up to move on, they became convulsed with laughter. I

scowled.

Had tea in the Pagoda tea-rooms, dry toast and brown bread and butter.

Two young men opposite me were quietly playing the fool.

"Hold my hand," one said audibly enough for two lovers to hear,

comfortably settled up in a corner. Even at a side view I could see them

kissing each other in between mouthfuls of bread and butter and jam.

On rising to go, one of the two hilarious youths removed my cap and

playfully placed it on top of the bowler which his friend was wearing.

"My cap, I think," I said sharply, and the young man apologised with a

splutter. I glared like a kill-joy of sixty.

On the 'bus, coming home, thro' streets full of motor traffic and all

available space plastered with advertisements that screamed at you, I

espied in front three pretty girls, who gave me the "Glad Eye." One had

a deep, musical voice, and kept on using it, one of the others a pretty

ankle and kept on showing it.

At Kew, two Italians came aboard, one of whom went out of his way to sit

among the girls. He sat level with them, and kept turning his head

around, giving them a sweeping glance as he did so, to shout remarks in

Italian to his friend behind. He thought the girls were prostitutes, I

think, and he may have been right. I was on the seat behind this man and

for want of anything better to do, studied his face minutely. In short,

it was fat, round, and greasy. He wore black moustachios with curly

ends, his eyes were dark shining, bulgy, and around his neck was wrapped

a scarf inside a dirty linen collar, as if he had a sore throat. I sat

behind him and hated him steadily, perseveringly.

At Hammersmith the three girls got off, and the bulgy-eyed Italian

watched them go with lascivious eyes, looking over the rail and down at

them on the pavement--still interested. I looked down too. They crossed

the road in front of us and disappeared.

Came home and here I am writing this. This is the content of to-day's

consciousness. This is about all I have thought, said, or done, or felt.

A stagnant day!

_March_ 26.

Home with a bad influenza cold. In a deplorable condition. The best I

could do was to sit by the fire and read newspapers one by one from the

first page to the last till the reading became mechanical. I found

myself reading an account of the Lincoln Handicap and a column article

on Kleptomania, while advertisements of new books were devoured with

relish as delicacies. My mind became a morass of current Divorce Court

News, Society Gossip--"if Sir A. goes Romeward, if Miss B. sings

true"--and advertisements. I went on reading because I was afraid to be

alone with myself.

B---- arrived at tea and after saying he felt very "pin-eyed" swallowed

a glass of Bols gin--the Gin of Antony Bols--and recovered sufficiently

to inform me delightedly that he had just won £50. He told me all the

story; meanwhile, I, tired of wiping and blowing my nose, sat in the

dirty armchair hunched up with elbows on knees and let it drip on to the

dirty carpet. B----, of course, noticed nothing, which was fortunate.

Some kinds of damned fool would have been kindly and sympathetic. I must

say I like old B----. I like him for his simpleness and utter absence of

self-consciousness, which make him as charming as a child. Moreover, he

often makes me a present of invaluable turf tips. Of course, he is a

liar, but his lies are harmless and on his mouth like milk on an

infant's. My own lies are much more dangerous. And when you are ill, to

be treated as tho' you were well is good for hypochondriacs.

_April_ 15.

H----'s wedding. Five minutes before time, I am told I made a dramatic

entry into the church clad in an audaciously light pair of Cashmere

trousers, lemon-coloured gloves, with top hat and cane. The latter

upset the respectability frightfully--it is not _comme il faut_.

_April_ 16.

... If I am to admit the facts they are that I eagerly anticipate love,

look everywhere for it, long for it, am unhappy without it. She

fascinates me--admitted. I could, if I would, surrender myself. Her

affection makes me long to do it. I am sick of living by myself. I am

frightened of myself. My life is miserable alone, and sometimes

desperately miserable when I long for a little sympathy to be close at

hand.

I have often tried to persuade R---- to share a flat with me, because I

don't really wish to marry. I struggle against the idea, I am egotist

enough to wish to shirk the responsibilities.

But then I am a ridiculously romantic creature with a wonderful ideal of

a woman I shall never meet or if I do she won't want me--"that (wholly)

impossible She." R---- in a flat with me would partly solve my

difficulties. I don't love her enough for marriage. Mine must be a grand

passion, a _bouleversement_--for I am capable of it.

_April_ 17.

_A Humble Confession_

The Hon. ----, son and heir of Lord ----, to-day invited me to lunch

with him in ---- Square. He's a handsome youth of twenty-five, with fair

hair and blue eyes.... and O! such an aristocrat. Good Lord.

But to continue: the receipt of so unexpected an invitation from so

glorious a young gentleman at first gave me palpitation of the heart. I

was so surprised that I scarcely had enough presence of mind to listen

to the rest of his remarks and later, it was only with the greatest

difficulty that I could recall the place where we arranged to meet. His

remarks, too, are not easy to follow, as he talks in a stenographic,

Alfred-Jingle-like manner, jerking out disjected members of sentences,

and leaving you to make the best of them or else to Hell with you--by

the Lord, I speak English, don't I? If I said, "I beg your pardon," he

jerked again, and left me often equally unenlightened.

On arriving at his home, the first thing he did was to shout down the

stairs to the basement: "Elsie, Elsie," while I gazed with awe at a

parcel on the hall table addressed to "Lord ----." Before lunch we sat

in his little room and talked about ----, but I was still quite unable

to regain my self-composure. I couldn't for the life of me forget that

here was I lunching with Lord ----'s son, on equal terms, with mutual

interests, that his sisters perhaps would come in directly or even the

noble Lord himself. I felt like a scared hare. How should I address a

peer of the realm? I kept trying to remember and every now and then for

some unaccountable reason my mind travelled into ----shire and I saw

Auntie C---- serving out tea and sugar over the counter of the baker's

shop in the little village. I luxuriated in the contrast, tho' I am not

at all inclined to be a snob.

He next offered me a cigarette, which I took and lit. It was a Turkish

cigarette with one end plugged up with cotton-wool--to absorb the

nicotine--a, thing I've never seen before. I was so flurried at the time

that I did not notice this and lit the wrong end. With perfect ease and

self-possession, the Honourable One pointed out my error to me and told

me to throw the cigarette away and have another.

By this time I had completely lost my nerve. My pride, chagrin,

excessive self-consciousness were entangling all my movements in the

meshes of a net. Failing to tumble to the situation, I inquired, "Why

the _wrong_ end? Is there a right and a wrong end?" Lord ----'s son and

heir pointed out the cotton-wool end, now blackened by my match.

"That didn't burn very well, did it?"

I was bound to confess that it did not, and threw the smoke away under

the impression that these wonderful cigarettes with right and wrong ends

must be some special brand sold only to aristocrats, and at a great

price, and possessing some secret virtue. Once again, handsome Mr. ----

drew out his silver cigarette-case, selected a second cigarette for me,

and held it towards me between his long delicate fingers, at the same

time pointing out the plug at one end and making a few staccato remarks

which I could not catch.

I was still too scared to be in full possession of my faculties, and he

apparently was too tired to be explicit to a member of the bourgeoisie,

stumbling about his drawing-room. The cotton-wool plug only suggested to

me some sort of a plot on the part of a dissolute scion of a noble house

to lure me into one of his bad habits, such as smoking opium or taking

veronal. I again prepared to light the cigarette at the wrong end.

"Try the other end," repeated the young man, smiling blandly. I blushed,

and immediately recovered my balance, and even related my knowledge of

pipes fitted to carry similar plugs....

During lunch (at which we sat alone) after sundry visits to the top of

the stairs to shout down to the kitchen, he announced that he thought it

wasn't last night's affair after all which was annoying the Cook (he got

home late without a latch-key)--it was because he called her "Cook"

instead of Mrs. Austin. He smiled serenely and decided to indulge Mrs.

A., his indulgent attitude betraying an objectionable satisfaction with

the security of his own unassailable social status. There was a trace of

gratification at the little compliment secreted in the Cook's annoyance.

She wanted Mr. Charles to call her Mrs. Austin, forsooth. Very well! and

he smiled down on the little weakness _de haute en bas_.

* * * * *

I enjoyed this little experience. Turning it over in my mind (as the

housemaid says when she decides to stay on) I have come to the

conclusion that the social parvenu is not such a vulgar fellow after

all. He may be a bore--particularly if he sits with his finger tips

apposed over a spherical paunch, festooned with a gold chain, and keeps

on relating _in extenso_ how once he gummed labels on blacking bottles.

Often enough he is a smug fellow, yet, truth to tell, we all feel a

little interested in him. He is a traveller from an antique land, and we

sometimes like to listen to his tales of adventure and all he has come

through. He has traversed large territories of human experience, he has

met strange folk and lodged in strange caravanserai. Similarly with the

man who has come down in the world--the fool, the drunkard, the

embezzler--he may bore us with his maudlin sympathy with himself yet his

stories hold us. It must be a fine experience within the limits of a

single life to traverse the whole keyboard of our social status, whether

up or down. I should like to be a peer who grinds a barrel organ or

(better still) a one-time organ-grinder who now lives in Park Lane. It

must be very dull to remain stationary--once a peer always a peer.

_April_ 20.

Miss ---- heard me sigh to-day and asked what it might mean. "Only the

sparks flying upward," I answered lugubriously.

A blackguard is often unconscious of a good deal of his wickedness.

Charge him with wickedness and he will deny it quite honestly--honest

then, perhaps, for the first time in his life.

An Entomologist is a large hairy man with eyebrows like antennæ.

Chronic constipation has gained for me an unrivalled knowledge of all

laxatives, aperients, purgatives and cathartic compounds. At present I

arrange two gunpowder plots a week. It's abominable. Best literature for

the latrine: picture puzzles.

_April_ 23.

_A Foolish Bird_

With a menacing politeness, B---- to-day inquired of a fat curate who

was occupying more than his fair share of a seat on top of a 'bus,--

"Are you going to get up or stay where ye are, sir?"

The foolish bird was sitting nearly on top of B----, mistaking a bomb

for an egg.

"I beg your pardon," replied the fat curate.

B---- repeated his inquiry with more emphasis in the hideous Scotch

brogue.

"I suppose I shall stay here till I get down presently."

"I don't think you will," said B----.

"What do you mean?" asked the fat one in falsetto indignation.

"This," B---- grunted, and shunted sideways so that the poor fellow

almost slid on to the floor.

A posse of police walking along in single file always makes me laugh. A

single constable is a Policeman, but several in single file are

"Coppers." I imagine every one laughs at them and I have a shrewd

suspicion it is one of W.S. Gilbert's legacies--the _Pirates of

Penzance_ having become part of the national Consciousness.

_On Lighting Chloe's Cigarette_

R---- remarked to-day that he intended writing a lyric on lighting

Chloe's cigarette.

"Ah!" I said at once appreciative, "now tell me, do you balance your

hand--by gently (ever so gently) resting the extreme tip of your little

finger upon her chin, and" (I was warming up) "do you hold the match

vertically or horizontally, and do you light it in the dark or in the

light? If you have finesse, you won't need to be told that the thing is

to get a steady flame and the maximum of illumination upon her face to

last over a period for as long as possible."

"Chloe," replied R----, "is wearing now a charming blouse with a

charming V-shaped opening in front. Her Aunt asked my Mother last night

tentatively, 'How do you like Chloe's blouse? Is it too low?' My Mother

scrutinised the dear little furry, lop-eared thing and answered

doubtfully, 'No, Maria, I don't think so.'"

"How ridiculous! Why the V is a positive signpost. My dear fellow," I

said to R----, "I should refuse to be bluffed by those old women. Tell

them you _know_."

* * * * *

Carlyle called Lamb a despicable abortion. What a crime!

_May_ 2.

Developed a savage fit. Up to a certain point, perhaps, but beyond that

anxiety changes into recklessness--you simply don't care. The aperients

are causing dyspepsia and intermittent action of the heart, which

frightens me. After a terrifying week, during which at crises I have

felt like dropping suddenly in the street, in the gardens, anywhere,

from syncope, I rebelled against this humiliating fear. I pulled my

shoulders back and walked briskly ahead along the street with a dropped

beat every two or three steps. I laughed bitterly at it and felt it

could stop or go on--I was at last indifferent. In a photographer's shop

was the picture of a very beautiful woman and I stopped to look at her.

I glowered in thro' the glass angrily and reflected how she was gazing

out with that same expression even at the butcher's boy or the

lamp-lighter. It embittered me to think of having to leave her to some

other man. To me she represented all the joy of life which at any moment

I might have had to quit for ever. Such impotence enraged me and I

walked off up the street with a whirling heart and the thought, "I shall

drop, I suppose, when I get up as far as that." Yet don't think I was

alarmed. Oh! no. The iron had entered me, and I went on with cynical

indifference waiting to be struck down.

... She is a very great deal to me. Perhaps I love her very much after

all.

_May_ 3.

Bad heart attack all day. Intermittency is very refined torture to one

who wants to live very badly. Your pump goes a "dot and carry one," or

say "misses a stitch," what time you breathe deep, begin to shake your

friend's hand and make a farewell speech. Then it goes on again and you

order another pint of beer.

It is a fractious animal within the cage of my thorax, and I never know

when it is going to escape and make off with my precious life between

its teeth. I humour and coax and soothe it, but, God wot, I haven't much

confidence in the little beast. My thorax it appears is an intolerable

kennel.

_May_ 10.

In a very cheerful mood. Pleased with myself and everybody till a

seagull soared overhead in Kensington Gardens and aroused my vast

capacities for envy--I wish I could fly.

_May_ 24.

In L---- with my brother, A----. The great man is in great form and very

happy in his love for N----. He is a most delightful creature and I love

him more than any one else in the wide world. There is an almost

feminine tenderness in my love.

We spent a delightful day, talking and arguing and insulting one

another.... At these seances we take delight in anaesthetising our

hearts for the purposes of argument, and a third person would be bound

to suppose we were in the throes of a bitter quarrel. We pile up one

vindictive remark on another, ingeniously seeking out--and with

malice--weak points in each other's armour, which previous exchange of

confidences makes it easy to find. Neither of us hesitates to make use

of such private confessions, yet our love is so strong that we can

afford to take any liberty. There is, in fact, a fearful joy in testing

the strength of our affection by searching for cutting rejoinders--to

see the effect. We rig up one another's cherished ideals like Aunt

Sallies and then knock them down, we wax sarcastic, satirical,

contemptuous in turn, we wave our hands animatedly (hand-waving is a

great trick with both of us), get flushed, point with our fingers, and

thump the table to clinch some bit of repartee. Yet it's all smoke. Our

love is unassailable--it's like the law of gravitation, you cannot

dispute it, it underlies our existence, it is the air we breathe.

N---- is charming, and thought we were quarrelling, and therefore

intervened on his side!

_May_ 31.

R---- outlined an impression he had in Naples one day during a sirocco

of the imminence of his own death. It was evidently an isolated

experience and bored me a little as I could have said a lot myself about

that. When he finished I drew from my pocket an envelope with my name

and three addresses scribbled on it to help the police in case of

syncope as I explained. I have carried this with me for several years

and at one time a flask of brandy.

_June_ 3.

Went to see the Irish Players in _The Playboy_. Sitting in front of me

was a charming little Irish girl accompanied by a male clod with

red-rimmed eyes like a Bull-terrier's, a sandy, bristly moustache like a

housemaid's broom, and a face like a gluteal mass, and a horrid voice

that crepitated rather than spoke.

She was dark, with shining blue eyes, and a delightful little nose of

the utmost import to every male who should gaze upon her. Between the

acts, the clod hearkened to her vivacious conversation--like an

enchanted bullock. Her vivacity was such that the tip of her nose moved

up and down for emphasis and by the end of the Third Act I was captured

entirely. Lucky dog, that clod!

After the play this little Irish maiden caught my eye and it became a

physical impossibility for me to check a smile--and oh! Heavens!--she

gave me a smile in return. Precisely five seconds later, she looked

again to see if I was still smiling--I was--and we then smiled broadly

and openly on one another--her smile being the timorous ingénue's not

the glad eye of a _femme de joie_. Later, on the railway platform

whither I followed her, I caught her eye again (was ever so lucky a

fellow?), and we got into the same carriage. But so did the clod--ah!

dear, was ever so unlucky a fellow? Forced to occupy a seat some way

off, but she caught me trying to see her thro' a midnight forest of

opera hats, lace ruffles, projecting ears and fat noses.

Curse! Left her at High Street Station and probably will never see her

again. This is a second great opportunity. The first was the girl on

Lundy Island. These two women I shall always regret. There must be so

many delightful and interesting persons in London if only I could get at

them.

_June_ 4.

Rushed off to tell R---- about my little Irish girl. Her face has been

"shadowing" me all day.

_June_ 6.

A violent argument with R---- _re_ marriage. He says Love means

appropriation, and is taking the most elaborate precautions to forfend

passion--just as if it were a militant suffragette. Every woman he meets

he first puts into a long quarantine, lest perchance she carries the

germ of the infectious disease. He quotes Hippolytus and talks like a

mediæval ascetic. Himself, I imagine, he regards as a valuable but

brittle piece of Dresden china which must be saved from rough handling

and left unmolested to pursue its high and dusty destiny--an old crock

as I warned him. By refusing to plunge into life he will live long and

be a well preserved man, but scarcely a living man--a mummy rather. I

told him so amid much laughter.

"You're a reactionary," says he.

"Yes, but why should a reactionary be a naughty boy?"

_June_ 7.

My ironical fate lured me this evening into another discussion on

marriage in which I had to take up a position exactly opposite to the

one I defended yesterday against R----. In fact, I actually subverted to

my own pressing requirements some of R----'s own arguments! The

argument, of course, was with Her.

Marriage, I urged, was an economic trap for guileless young men, and for

my part (to give myself some necessary stiffening) I did not intend to

enter upon any such hazardous course, even if I had the chance. Miss

---- said I was a funk--to me who the day before had been hammering

into R---- my principle of "Plunge and damn the consequences." I was

informed I was an old woman afraid to go out without an umbrella, an old

tabby cat afraid to leave the kitchen fire, etc., etc.

"Yes, I _am_ afraid to go out without an umbrella," I argued formally,

"when it's raining cats and dogs. As long as I am dry, I shall keep dry.

As soon as I find myself caught in the rain or victimised by a passion,

I shan't be afraid of falling in love or getting wet. It would be a

misadventure, but I am not going in search of one."

All the same the discussion was very galling, for I was acting a part.

... The truth is I have philandered abominably with her. I know it. And

now I am jibbing at the idea of marriage.... I am such an egotist, I

want, I believe, a Princess of the Blood Royal.

_June_ 9.

Some days ago sent a personal advertisement to the newspaper to try to

find my little Irish girl who lives at Notting Hill Gate. To-day they

return me the money and advert, no doubt mistaking me for a White Slave

trafficker. And by this time, I'm thinking, my little Irish girl can go

to blazes. Shall spend the P.O. on sweets or monkey nuts.

_June_ 10

_Lupus_

It is raining heavily. I have just finished dinner. In the street an

itinerant musician is singing dolefully, "O Rest in the Lord." In my

dirty little sitting room I begin to feel very restless, so put on my

hat and cloak and walk down towards the Station for a paper to read. It

is all very dark and dismal, and I gaze with hungry eyes in thro' some

of the windows disclosing happy comfortable interiors. At intervals

thunder growls and lightning brightens up the deserted dirtiness of the

Station Waiting Room. A few bits of desolate paper lie about on the

floor, and up in one corner on a form a crossing-sweeper, motionless and

abject, driven in from his pitch by the rain. His hands are deep in his

trousers' pockets, and the poor devil lies with legs sprawling out and

eyes closed: over the lower part of his face he wears a black mask to

hide the ravages of lupus.... He seemed the last man on earth--after

every one else had died of the plague. Not a soul in the station. Not a

train. And this is June!

_June_ 15.

_Measuring Lice_

Spent the day measuring the legs and antennæ of lice to two places of

decimals!

To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem! Indeed, I hope it is

fantastic. I do not mind being thought odd. It seems almost fitting that

an incurable dilettante like myself should earn his livelihood by

measuring the legs of lice. I like to believe that such a bizarre manner

of life suits my incurable frivolousness.

I am a Magpie in a Bagdad bazaar, hopping about, useless, inquisitive,

fascinated by a lot of astonishing things: _e.g._, a book on the

quadrature of the circle, the _gabbertushed fustilugs_ passage in

Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, names like Mr. Portwine or Mr.

Hogsflesh, Tweezer's Alley or Pickle Herring Street, the excellent,

conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable or Petticoat Lane on a Sunday

morning.

Colossal things such as Art, Science, etc., frighten me. I am afraid I

should develop a thirst that would make me wish to drink the sea dry. My

mind is a disordered miscellany. The world is too distracting. I cannot

apply myself for long. London bewilders me. At times it is a

phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.

_June_ 17.

Prof. Geo. Saintsbury's book on Elizabethan literature amuses me.

_George_, there can be no doubt, is a very refined, cultivated fellow. I

bet he don't eat periwinkles with a pin or bite his nails--and you

should hear him refer to folk who can't read Homer in the original or

who haven't been to Oxford--to Merton above all. He also says _non so

che_ for _je ne sais quoi_.

_June_ 26.

... I placed the volume on the mantelpiece as if it were a bottle of

physic straight from my Dispensary, and I began to expostulate and

expound, as if she were a sick person and I the doctor.... She seemed a

little nettled at my proselytising demeanour and gave herself out to be

very preoccupied--or at any rate quite uninterested in my physic. I read

the book last night at one sitting and was boiling over with it.

"I fear I have come at an inconvenient time," I said, with a sardonic

smile and strummed on the piano.... "I must really be off. Please read

it (which sounded like 'three times a day after meals') and tell me how

you like it. (Facetiously.) Of course don't give up your present manual

for it, that would be foolish and unnecessary." ... I rambled

on--disposed to be very playful.

At last calmly and horribly, in a thoughtful voice she answered,--

"I think you are very rude; you play the piano after I asked you to

stop and walk about just as if it were your own home."

I remained outwardly calm but inwardly was very surprised and full of

tremors. I said after a pause,--

"Very well, if you think so.... Good-bye."

No answer; and I was too proud to apologise.

"Good-bye," I repeated.

She went on reading her novel in silence while I got as far as the

door--very upset.

"_Au revoir_."

No answer.

"Oh," said I, and went out of the room leaving my lady for good and all

and I'm not sorry.

In the passage met Miss ----. "What?" she said, "going already?"

"Farewell," I said sepulchrally. "A very tragic farewell," which left

her wondering.

_June_ 29.

_At the Albert Hall_

Went with R---- to the Albert Hall to the _Empress of Ireland_ Memorial

Concert with massed bands. We heard the Symphonie Pathétique, Chopin's

Funeral March, Trauermarsch from Götterdammerung, the Ride of the

Valkyries and a solemn melody from Bach.

This afternoon I regard as a mountain peak in my existence. For two

solid hours I sat like an Eagle on a rock gazing into infinity--a very

fine sensation for a London Sparrow....

I have an idea that if it were possible to assemble the sick and

suffering day by day in the Albert Hall and keep the Orchestra going all

the time, then the constant exposure of sick parts to such heavenly air

vibrations would ultimately restore to them the lost rhythm of health.

Surely, even a single exposure to--say Beethoven's Fifth Symphony--must

result in some permanent reconstitution of ourselves body and soul. No

one can be quite the same after a Beethoven Symphony has streamed thro'

him.

If one could _develop_ a human soul like a negative the effect I should

say could be seen.... I'll tell you what I wish they'd do--seriously:

divide up the arena into a series of cubicles where, unobserved and in

perfect privacy, a man could execute all the various movements of his

body and limbs which the music prompts. It would be such a delicious

self-indulgence and it's torture to be jammed into a seat where you

can't even tap one foot or wave an arm.

The concert restored my moral health. I came away in love with people I

was hating before and full of compassion for others I usually condemn. A

feeling of immeasurable well being--a jolly bonhomie enveloped me like

incandescent light. At the close when we stood up to sing the National

Anthem we all felt a genuine spirit of camaraderie. Just as when Kings

die, we were silent musing upon the common fate, and when the time came

to separate we were loath to go our several ways, for we were comrades

who together had come thro' a great experience. For my part I wanted to

shake hands all round--happy travellers, now alas! at the journey's end

and never perhaps to meet again--never.

R---- and I walked up thro' Kensington Gardens like two young Gods!

"I even like that bloody thing," I said, pointing to the Albert

Memorial.

We pointed out pretty girls to one another, watched the children play

ring-a-ring-a-roses on the grass. We laughed exultingly at the thought

of our dismal colleagues ... tho' I said (as before!) I loved 'em

all--God bless 'em--even old ----. R---- said it was nothing short of

insolence on their part to have neglected the opportunity of coming to

the Concert.

Later on, an old gaffer up from the country stopped us to ask the way to

Rotten Row--I overwhelmed him with directions and happy descriptive

details. I felt like walking with him and showing him what a wonderful

place the world is.

After separating from R---- very reluctantly--it was horrible to be left

alone in such high spirits, walked up towards the Round Pond, and caught

myself avoiding the shadows of the trees--so as to be every moment out

in the blazing sun. I scoffed inwardly at the timorousness of pale,

anæmic folk whom I passed hiding in the shadows of the elms.

At the Round Pond, came across a Bulldog who was biting out great chunks

of water and in luxuriant waste-fulness letting it drool out again from

each corner of his mouth. I watched this old fellow greedily (it was

very hot), as well pleased with him and his liquid "chops" as with

anything I saw, unless it were a girl and a man lying full length along

the grass and kissing beneath a sunshade. I smiled; she saw me, and

smiled, too, in return, and then fell to kissing again.

_June_ 30.

_Dinosaurs_

There are books which are Dinosaurs--Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of

the World_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. There are

men who are Dinosaurs--Balzac completing his Human Comedy, Napoleon,

Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I

enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice

caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these

things. I like everything that is swift or immense: London, lightning,

Popocatepetl. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, or a

brass band playing a Liszt Rhapsody. And why should those foolish Mænads

shout Women's Rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires

are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a

tame rabbit's. If only I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage! I

would return to Nature--I could almost return to Chaos. There are times

when I feel so dour I would wreck the universe if I could.[1]

(1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go

back to top hats and civilisation.)

_July_ 8.

_Sunset in Kensington Gardens_

The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically--at morning and evening.

This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset--however

work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine--our natural

impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and

stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we

are too occupied or asleep--but sunrise is the great hour of the

departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a

mysterious appearance--to-night the tops of the elms seemed

super-naturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion

with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had

been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud

stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour

of the approach; then slowly the news came thro' that the sun had

arrived for immediate departure.

_July_ 14.

Have finished my essay. But am written out--obviously. To-night I

struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen.

But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were

the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical

solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand,

unable to produce a word.

_July_ 19.

For a walk with R---- in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle's

house at ----. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss ----,

a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope

and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping

out (as R---- said) like two white mice one after the other as she

moved across the lawn.

Coming home I said to R---- histrionically, "Some golden-haired little

boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and

depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful

picture--would that I were the father to make that group a _fait

accompli._" R----, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as

"that elegant virgin."

_July_ 25.

While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R---- heard a

whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming "young thing" leaning over the

Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.

"Come down," he cried.

She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked

with her to the Broadway, saw her into a 'bus and said "Good-bye,"

without so much as an exchange of names.

"Even if she _were_ a whore," I said, "it's a pity your curiosity was so

sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home

with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at

Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious

water-colour painting."

"Perhaps," replied he enigmatically.

"Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again," I rejoined, "don't

introduce her to that abominable ----. He is abominably handsome, and I

hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome--parentage,

money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the

inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman."

R. (reflectively): "Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a

_passion_ did not exist."

"Have you none?"

"Not much," he answered, and I believe it.

"Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions

but I am not a pale water-colour artist.... What's the matter with you,"

I foamed, "is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you

would exclaim contemplatively, 'How lovely;' then putting out one hand

to touch her, unsuspectingly, you'd scream aghast, 'Oh! it's alive, I

hear it ticking.' 'Yes, my boy,' I answer severely with a flourish,

'_That_ is a woman's heart.'"

R---- exploded with laughter and then said, "A truce to your desire for

more life, for actual men and women. ... I know this that last night I

would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of

Dostoieffsky's _The Possessed_ for a Balaclava Charge."

"A matter of temperament, I suppose," I reflected, in cold detachment.

"You see, I belong to the raw meat school. _You_ prefer life cooked for

you in a book. You prefer the confectioner's shop to cutting down the

wheat with your own scythe."

_July_ 26.

The B.M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I

require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the

propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, "Yes." If you ask

for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, "No, but we'll cut off

your nose with a big pair of scissors."

_July_ 27.

To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this

morning, I exclaimed,--

"I'd sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor's Banquet.

Turtle Soup ain't in it."

She was uninspired, and said, "Oom," and went on pinning insects. Then

more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her

words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great

deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered,--

"I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones

(Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone."

Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say "Oom."

"Pretty dismal work," I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought

I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie

Solar sing, "You made me love you," and then absent-mindedly and in

succession inquired,--

"What's become of all the gold?"

"What's become of Waring?"

"What shall I sing when all is sung?"

To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but

presently in the usual voice,--

"I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want

it, cannot find it."

"Life is like that," I said. "I never can find my Agrionines!"

_August_ 1.

All Europe is mobilising.

_August_ 2.

Will England join in?

_August_ 12.

We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The

tension makes me feel physically sick.

_August_ 21--_August_ 24.

In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly

came over to see me.

_September_ 25.

[Living now in rooms alone.]

I have--since my return from Cornwall--placed all my journals in a

specially made cabinet. R---- came to dinner and after a glass or so of

Beaune and a cigarette, I open my "coffin"[2] (it is a long box with a

brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a

volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish

punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, "A little of 1912?"

as if we were trying wines. R---- grins at the little farce and so

encourages me.

_September_ 26.

Doctor's Consulting Rooms--my life has been spent in them! Medical

specialists--Harley Street men--I have seen four and all to no purpose.

M---- wrote me the other day,--

"Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find

something we can patch."

He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come

away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, "Good-bye,

old man, and good luck." More luck than the pharmacopœia.

My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and

ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that

this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my

will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind

there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to

realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last

long enough to convince others of what I might have done--had I lived.

That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have

overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of

security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life--nothing

more than a shadowy _locum tenens_, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely

to disappear any moment.

At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure

here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is

too late ... and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I

am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to

circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every

week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not

collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.

One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened

blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go

on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the

serpents--the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart

tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to

convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I

must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice

that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, "Are you quite sure you

are such an important fellow as you imagine?" Or I fret over the

condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in

acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won't give

in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain

all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I

write things down so as to look them up in reference books--I am always

looking up the things I remember I have forgotten....

There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies....

It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love

of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir

Thomas Browne you say, "Every man is his own Atropos."

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray

street, in these drab, dirty rooms--miserable in its emptiness of home,

love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two

houses in London--the Doctor's and R----'s Hotel. I walk along the

streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little

society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing

people everywhere in London--millions of them--and then to realise my

own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately

eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die

to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and

women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils.

I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am

anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live

in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying

to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period

truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.

Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am

sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms,

with an ugly landlady's face when ... I despair of ever finding a woman

to _love_. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in

appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not

without attractions. "He grows on you," a girl said of me once. But I am

hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much.... I search daily in

the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful

and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It

will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.

"There's a beautiful young thing," R---- and I say to one another

sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.

I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger--baulked, frustrated as I am at

almost every turn of life--in my profession, in my literary efforts, and

in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination

service in my present state of mind.

_October_ 7.

To me woman is _the_ wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next

world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people

standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly

experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me

on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, "WOMAN."

_October_ 11.

Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears

of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy

combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by

conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go

off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when

Mother died, and the third was _to-day._ But I am calm now. To-day they

were tears of remorse....

On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and

strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my

secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God

really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save

me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch.... It is

not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel

defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.

Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: "For myself I have felt

exceptionally blest having Hell's phantoms inside me to thrust at in the

dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic

victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro' the bars of my own

sickness and weakness--joys with which your notions of happiness, poor

sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you

to give birth to a dancing star."

But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough

to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a

little somehow to-day. But it's all in desperation, not in faith.

Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the

consolation of genius.

_October_ 12.

Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and

small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny--especially at

times like these when--God love us all--there is a column of casualties

each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am _alive_ and

alive _now_, that I was alive _yesterday_, and even may be to-morrow.

Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I'm

a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others

in a worse one. I'm going to be brave and fight on the side of

Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!

_October_ 13.

Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to

work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I

couldn't sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously

like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking

to some one, to be among human beings.

Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down

the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were

a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there,

and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on

my own initiative. K---- has managed to bring about a rapprochement but

I go very seldom. Pride again.

I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to

look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to

do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am

in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put

on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness!

Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see

her figure constantly before me--gentle, graceful, calm, stretching

forth both hands and to me....

Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience

because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great

ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one,

I might have known I was in for trouble.

_October_ 14.

_Marie Bashkirtseff_

Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a

book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of

my own. Who _are_ you? I wondered.

This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind's

introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be

difficult in all the world's history to discover any two persons with

temperaments so alike. She is the "very spit of me "! I devoured

Mathilde Blind's pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh,

Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I

feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding

ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate--ill! So am I. Her

journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written

down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some

heart-rending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating

for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is

there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was

born in 1889.

_October_ 15.

A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason

than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face?

He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out

of taste to entertain opinions about one's personal appearance.

As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me!

I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I

am not handsome, but I look interesting--I hope distinguished. My eyes

are deep-set ... but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair

right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde

Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in

the night forces the back door!

* * * * *

To-day, M---- sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R---- in

my manner of speech and opinions.

Now R---- has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself--for all the

world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the

contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me

writhe. As we are inseparable friends--everybody assumes that I am his

tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose,

is my guide, philosopher, and Great Maecenas--Oxford befriending the

proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick--that any one should

believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures

and manner of voice.

"Lost yourself?" inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I

came out of R----'s room after finding him out. I could have shot him

dead! ... As for ---- more than one person thinks that he alone is the

brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of

thinking it.

"It makes me hate you like mad," I said to him to-day. "How can I

confront these people with the naked truth?" R---- chuckled

complacently.

"If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if

suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I'm induced to declare that I loathe you

(as I sometimes do)"--(more chuckles) "that your breath stinks, your

eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will

think I am either jealous or insincere.... To be your Echo tho'!--my

God!" I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went

to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.

_Resignation_

In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me--pale-faced,

grief-stricken, demure--a sort of "Thy Will be Done" look. The

adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It

is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War.

Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won't this demure widow

with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits

this iniquitous war?

_October_ 21.

I myself (licking a stamp): "The taste of gum is really very nice."

R.: "I hate it."

I: "My dear fellow" (surprised and entreating), "envelope gum is simply

delicious."

R.: "I never lick stamps--it's dangerous--microbes."

I: "I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with

them."

R.: "Yes, you'll need to."

(Laughter.)

Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and

Worthington's, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner,--

"Ah! yes, it's only when the day is over that the day really

begins--what?"

_October_ 23.

I expressed to R---- to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave

and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!)

R---- was rather cold. "His exploits," said this bloody fool, "involve

loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic."

I cleared my throat and began,--

"Your precious sociology again--it will be the ruin of your career as an

artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never

see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to

approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may

be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say.... You'll soon be drawing

landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture

of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit." And so on to our own

infinite mutual amusement.

The _English Review_ returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with

an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I

cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever

find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do

not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and

milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.

_October_ 24.

Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back

along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St.

Paul's, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.

Near Reilly's Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with

the inscription in both French and English: "This is easy to draw but

hard to earn." A baby's funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge

among Pink's jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and

matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.

In the St. Catherine's Way there is one part like a deep railway

cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the

brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully

curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of

warehouses and business establishments--a wonderful sight; and

everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge,

paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside

Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel--for market prices--but

instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a

cat's rear and tail with anatomical details.

In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular

literature--one brochure entitled _Suspended for Life_ to indicate the

terrible punishment meted out to ----, a League footballer. The

frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles' throats!

Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, "Anything on

this stall _lent_ for 1d." A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a

fellow-tradesman in the same line of business,--

"They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on."

Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch's

_The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays_ was displayed prominently

beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.

In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for

Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their

buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling

_L'Indépendance Belge_ or pamphlets entitled, _Why We Went to War_.

In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I

bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at

three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the

case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and

keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.

Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman

in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ....

Returned to the Library and read the _Dublin Review_ (article on Samuel

Butler), _North American Review_ (one on Henry James) and dined at seven.

After dinner, read: _Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster_, and the

_New Statesman_. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth

Symphony of Beethoven.

_October_ 25.

_Too Late_

Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread

out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to

explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically

register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the

Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to

speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge

of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation

yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back

like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the

_Dublin Review_!

What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of

studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough

Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not

to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of

appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their

true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if

you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and

fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient

as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present

inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push

my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some

of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and

formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All

that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an

indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them

in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match

dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled

student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen

after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor

villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all

are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to

harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from

the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth

is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a

drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the

coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's _Comparative

Anatomy of Vertebrates_. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's

_Paleontology_ with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling

_Pariasaurus_ and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports

from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!

London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now

my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me

infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand

is permanently "pins and needles" and in the finger tips I have lost all

sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes

I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?

A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in

almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London.

Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver's shuttle and

numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show.

Everywhere always in the street people--millions of them --whom I do not

know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as

to-day I wake up and race about beside myself--a swollen bag ready to

burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.

_Apologia pro vita mea_

How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for

continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all

time?

Well, here are some precedents:--

Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland

agonised at Leipsig.

Hegel wrote the last lines of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ within sound

of the guns of Jena.

While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne,

ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the

song the Sirens sang.

Lacépède composed his _Histoire des Poissons_ during the French

Revolution.

Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.

This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the

importance of my own work. "He is quite the little poet," some one said

of Keats. "It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte," said Keats,

in a pet, "that he's quite the little general."

_A Woman and a Child_

On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of

young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully

girlish young creature--a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she

stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a 'bus, smiling and

chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love,

maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.

We got on the same 'bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed

in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her--she smiled

delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty

people never touched lips before--I'm certain of it. It was impossible

to believe that this virginal creature was a mother--childbirth left no

trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in

her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was

watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy

again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the

homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence

that she was the mother at all.

_The Albert Hall Hag_

While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast

thrust itself before me--she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam

that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt,

cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and

over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes,

dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat,

beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a

knot--this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!)

stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow

across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not

play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the

strings--they merely held the handle.

A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, "Not

'arf," but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt,

holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold

her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her

mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice

of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one

realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her

skirt as she squeaked, "Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O

sea," etc. The words were scarcely audible tho' she stood but two yards

off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She

seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage

to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us--one would say she was

frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.

After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the

distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful

task--like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into

bed--she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money

bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this

harrowing incident--for each time she held out the bag, she smiled,

which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar

prominence and said something--an inarticulate noise in a very high

pitch. "A woman," I whispered to R----, "She claims to be a woman." If

any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait

patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile

vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the

opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing

absently--two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head

which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an

objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.

As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she

thought, "Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man's aid?" The clink

of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her

terrible grimacing smile.

Why didn't I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if you please.... And she may have been a

well-to-do vagrant--well got up for the occasion--a clever

simulator?...

_October_ 28.

_Rigor Bordis_

Rigor bordis!--I write like this as if it were a light matter. But

to-night I was _in extremis_.... First I read the paper; then I finished

the book I was reading--"_Thus Spake Zarathustra_." Not knowing quite

what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of

coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a

cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:--

How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half

before bedtime.

Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work--I

don't sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental

unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing

seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic

for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I

should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.

Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I

sat down and played a game of Patience--no one knows how I loathe

playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring

of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to

look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a

beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely,

took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the

mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass.... I was at bay at last.

There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have

some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must

stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release.

I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life.

I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn't feel

more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my

lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before

my mind's eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself

sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street,

with the landlady's dirty daughter below-stairs singing, "Little Grey

Home in the West," my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my

mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on

grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.

This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had

dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into

merely aesthetic malaise.

_November_ 4.

A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote

the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea

(like the swine I am). Could I see him?

* * * * *

Endured an hour's torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I

should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian

Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till

after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot

water--the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly

retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing

back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the

reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could

be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could

shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the

sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)

Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on

hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had

decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.

Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth

reading the _Freethinker_.

_November_ 9.

In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps ...

but now....

I don't think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the

state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to.... It was

just to get it off my mind--a plain statement.... If I don't really and

truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good

reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate

with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to

have spoken.

_November_ 10.

Very miserable. Asked R---- three times to come and have dinner with me.

Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. _Tu l'as voulu,

George Dandin_--that's the rub.

_November_ 11.

She observed me carefully--I'm looking a perfect wreck _--tu l'as voulu,

George Dandin_--but it's mainly ill-health and not on her account.

I said,--

"Some things are too funny to laugh at."

"Is that why you are so solemn?"

"No," I answered, "I'm not solemn, I am laughing--some things are too

solemn to be serious about."

She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly--an amused faraway smile

of feline satisfaction....

_November_ 12.

Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol--a

Browning. Or of 10 days' mysterious disappearance, when I will go and

live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings

with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I

disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.

_November_ 13.

Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my

Essay was returned by the Editor of ----. One by one I have been

divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me

the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have

been foiled, and now I've nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact

that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my

whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my

life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself

as I am at last--and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for

me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do

but die?

_November_ 14.

Before going over to-night bought _London Opinion_ deliberately in order

to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at

her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one

personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which

came off, tho' I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty

bearing.

"Don't you ever swear?" I asked. "It's a good thing you know, swearing

is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The

person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating

in his blood."

"Swearing is not the only remedy."

"I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate's sermon: I prefer

pimples to pills."

Is it a wonder she does not love me?

* * * * *

I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours--why have I this

morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a

cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful

loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself,

and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and

disgust.

I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I

am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion,

only a dragging heavy chain of attraction ... some inflexible law makes

me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I

cannot look away....

In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love--as one would a

bastard child--I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the

murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name

and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed. ... That is

all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated

essence of womanhood that flowed from her....

Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it--it is a

scalp.

Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural

instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me. That was

cruel tho' true.

_November_ 19.

I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and

desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my

lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of

self-commiseration--my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot

get warm--try as I will.

My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my

peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are

permanently cold. My right hand is blue--tho' I've shut up the window

and piled up a roaring fire. It's Antarctic cold and desolation. London

in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very

terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I

marvel how God can stick it--lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That

is how I live too--but then I am not God.

I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to

drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have

frequented bars and billiards saloons and in fits of depression done my

best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it

would take a lot to make _me_ forget myself). So I plunge into these

literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens' Blue-black Ink. It

gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know....

It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease

would act as a stimulus--I could strike an attitude feverishly and be

histrionic. But to be merely "below par"--to feel like a Bunny rabbit

perennially "poorly," saps my character and mental vigour. I want to

crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me

wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They

suspect him, something fishy.

_November_ 20.

Still at home ill.

If anything, R---- is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the

present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he's in love

with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me

fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy

by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and

deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he

discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving

a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes.

Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the

phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.

"Why don't you marry her out of hand and be done with all this

dalliance? I can tell you what's the matter with you," I growled,

"you're a landscape artist.... You'll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy,

secretive, petty creature, J.W.M. Turner, and allow no human being to

interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps--but what a man! You'll

finish up with a Mrs. Danby."

"Yes," he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, "and 'lose my

salvation for a sketch,' like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not

married I should have no wife to desert."

It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art

not life. Life interests him--he can't altogether resign himself to the

cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being

a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking

exquisitely, "Ah! there is a very fine sorrow," or, "What an exquisite

sensation." The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts

around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip

in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it

with a facetious grin, I said,--

"Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning." The joke pleased

him and we roared, bellowed.

"That terrible forefinger of yours," he smiled.

"Like Cardinal Richelieu's eyes--piercing?" I suggested with

appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space

between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)

"You must regard my passion for painting," he began once more, "as a

sort of dipsomania--I really can't help myself."

I jumped on him vehemently,--

"Exactly, my pernickety friend; it's something abnormal and unnatural.

When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off

great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I

know that if he is successful he'll be something as vulgar as a fat

woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he'll be just a

pathetic mutilation.... You are trying to pervert a natural instinct.

You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age

of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair.... Still,

now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?" ("Why

indeed?") "It's a vice, and I'm very sorry for you, old boy. I'll do all

I can--come and have some dinner with me to-night."

"Oh! thank you very much," says my gentleman, "but I'm not at all sorry

for myself."

"I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all.

We're not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each

other from the ropes and shaping for another round."

"Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals," he

reflected, "are worthy of a larger audience.... To find _you_ of all

people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle

of every one's vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view.

Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same

reasons."

"I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair," I

began, "I _do_ see every one's point of view. You sit on the other side

of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a

moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But

when you slit up my brother's abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently

weak and human to punch you on the nose.... You are too cold and

Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints."

"It is very beautiful among the snows."

"I suppose so."

(Exit.)

_November_ 23.

Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get

out of bed and shoulder the day's burden.

"What's been the matter?" they ask.

"Oh! senile decay--general histolysis of the tissues," I say, fencing.

To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at

once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned

my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue

which means, "Dear, dear." M---- tells me these waves of ill-health are

quite unaccountable unless I were "leading a dissolute life, which you

do not appear to be doing." Damn his eyes.

_Reading Nietzsche_

Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like

myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The

smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on

antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.

_The Test for True Love_

The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting

your sweetheart's toe-nails--the onychiotomic test. Or whether you find

your Julia's sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night.

Probably she thinks I only "saw it in a book."

_Chopin_

On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra.

It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery.

It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the

attention and holds it just as a fire does--even a deaf man would be

fascinated. Heard Chopin's Funeral March and other things. It would be a

rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to

Chopin's Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with

Sir Henry Wood conducting.

Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian

Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony....

_November_ 28.

_Rodin_

More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin's recent gifts

to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The "Prodigal

Son" is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my

second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand--a superb

touch!--what a frenzy of remorse!

The "Fallen Angel" I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly

backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it--down the thighs

and over the calves to the tips of the toes--like the hind limbs of some

beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in

the woman in the group called "Eternal Spring," which I have only seen

in a photograph.

This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and,

for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any

kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a

soft warm embrace.... I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody

for solo violin in Chopin's Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged

for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body,

purely physical.

_November_ 29.

This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble

together thro' dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!

* * * * *

_December_ 6.

I know now--I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are

returning. Projects in view:--

(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.

(2) To get married.

(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.

(4) To write two essays for _Cornhill_ which shall surely induce the

Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and

encouraging letters as heretofore.

Wired to A----, "The brave little pennon has been hauled down."

_December_ 7.

Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them

done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish

them thro' physical or temperamental disabilities--a breakdown in health

or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no

one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I

badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man's a

fool that wants to die.

_December_ 9.

... I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, "Why do I

love you?--Tell me," but she only smiled gently and said, "I cannot

tell...." I ought not to love her, I know--every omen is against it....

Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his

brains and air of distinction....

Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous ... I am haunted by the memory

of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to

dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the

cakes--the unravelling of the internal economy of a _Helix_ caused as

great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look

for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as

once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I

am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry's Orchestra as once

to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from

my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never

read nature books--my old favourites--Waterton's _Wanderings_, Gilbert

White, _The Zoologist_, etc.--have no interest for me--in fact they give

me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old

Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire

just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and

saw only zoology. Now in London, I've taken the bit in my mouth--and

it's a mouth of iron--wanting a run for all my troubles before Death

strikes me down.

All this evidence of my temperamental instability alarms and distresses

me on reflection and makes the soul weary. I wish I loved more steadily.

I am always sidetracking myself. The title of "husband" scares me.

_December_ 12.

_Sir Henry Wood conducting_

Went to the Queen's Hall, sat in the Orchestra and watched Sir Henry's

statuesque figure conducting thro' a forest of bows, "which pleased me

mightily." He would be worth watching if you were stone deaf. If you

could not hear a sound, the animation and excitement of an orchestra in

full swing, with the conductor cutting and slashing at invisible foes,

make a magnificent spectacle.

The face of Sir Henry Wood strikes me as very much like the traditional

pictures of Jesus Christ, tho' Sir Henry is dark--the melanic Messiah I

call him (very much to my own delight). Rodin ought to do him in

stone--Chesterfield's ideal of a man--a Corinthian edifice on Tuscan

foundations. In Sir Henry's case there can be no disputing the Tuscan

foundations. However swift and elegant the movements of his arms, his

splendid lower extremities remain as firm as stone columns. While the

music is calm and serene his right hand and baton execute in concert

with the left, perfect geometric curves around his head. Then as it

gathers in force and volume, when the bows begin to dart swiftly across

the fiddles and the trumpets and trombones blaze away in a

conflagration, we are all expectant--and even a little fearful, to

observe his sabre-like cuts. The tension grows ... I hold my breath....

Sir Henry snatches a second to throw back a lock of his hair that has

fallen limply across his forehead, then goes on in unrelenting pursuit,

cutting and slashing at hordes of invisible fiends that leap howling out

towards him. There is a great turmoil of combat, but the Conductor

struggles on till the great explosion happens. But in spite of that, you

see him still standing thro' a cloud of great chords, quite undaunted.

His sword zigzags up and down the scale--suddenly the closed fist of his

left hand shoots up straight and points to the zenith--like the arm of a

heathen priest appealing to Baal to bring down fire from Heaven.... But

the appeal avails nought and it looks as tho' it were all up for poor

Sir Henry. The music is just as infuriated--his body writhes with

it--the melanic Messiah crucified by the inappeasable desire to express

by visible gestures all that he feels in his heart. He surrenders --so

you think--he opens out both arms wide and baring his breast, dares them

all to do their worst--like the picture of Moffat the missionary among

the savages of the Dark Continent!

And yet he wins after all. At the very last moment he seems to summon

all his remaining strength and in one final and devastating sweep mows

down the orchestra rank by rank.... You awake from the nightmare to

discover the victor acknowledging the applause in a series of his

inimitable bows.

One ought to pack one's ears up with cotton wool at a concert where Sir

Henry conducts. Otherwise, the music is apt to distract one's attention.

R.L.S. wanted to be at the head of a cavalry charge--sword over

head--but I'd rather fight an orchestra with a baton.

_Beethoven's Fifth Symphony_

This symphony always works me up into an ecstasy; in ecstatic sympathy

with its dreadfulness I could stand up in the balcony and fling myself

down passionately into the arena below. Yet there were women sitting

alongside me to-day--knitting! It so annoyed and irritated me that at

the end of the first movement I got up and sat elsewhere. They would

have sat knitting at the foot of the Cross, I suppose.

At the end of the second movement, two or three other women got up and

went home to tea! It would have surprised me no more to have seen a cork

extract itself from its bottle and promenade.

_Tschaikovsky_

Just lately I've heard a lot of music including Tschaikovsky's

Pathétique and Fifth Symphonies, some Debussy, and odd pieces by Dukas,

Glinka, Smetana, Mozart. I am chock-full of impressions of all this

precious stuff and scarcely know what to write. As usual, the third

movement of the Pathétique produced a frenzy of exhilaration; I seemed

to put on several inches around my chest and wished to shout in a voice

of thunder. The conventions of a public concert hall are dreadfully

oppressive at such times. I could have eaten "all the elephants of

Hindustan and picked my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

In the last movement of the Fifth Symphony of that splendid fellow

Tschaikovsky, the orchestra seemed to gallop away leaving poor Landon

Ronald to wave his whip in a ridiculously ineffective way. They went on

crashing down chords, and just before the end I had the awful

presentiment that the orchestra simply could not stop. I sat still

straining every nerve in the expectancy that this chord or the next or

the next was the end. But it went on pounding down--each one seemed the

last but every time another followed as passionate and emphatic as the

one before, until finally, whatever this inhuman orchestra was

attempting to crush and destroy must have been reduced to shapeless

pulp. I wanted to board the platform and plead with them, elderly

gentlemen turned their heads nervously, everyone was breathless, we all

wanted to call "For God's sake, stop"--to do anything to still this

awful lust for annihilation.... The end came quickly in four drum beats

in quick succession. I have never seen such hate, such passionate

intensity of the will to destroy.... And Tschaikovsky was a Russian!

Debussy was a welcome change. "L'Après-midi d'un Faun" is a musical

setting to an oscitatory exercise. It is an orchestral yawn. Oh! so

tired!

Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to every one "Bally good,

ain't it?" and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.

_December_ 14.

My rooms are littered with old concert programmes and the Doctor's

prescriptions (in the yellow envelopes of the dispenser) for my various

ailments and diseases, and books, books, books.

Among the latter those lying on my table at this moment are--

Plays of M. Brieux.

_Joseph Vance._

The Sequel to _Pragmatism: The Meaning of Truth_, by Wiliam James.

_Beyond Good and Evil._

Dostoievsky's _The Possessed._

Marie Bashkirtseff's _Journal._

I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am

almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only

her duplicate.

On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my

youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A

plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with

indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.

_December_ 15.

_Petticoat Lane_

This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.

On turning the corner to go into Middlesex Street, as it it now called,

the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for

selling Belgian button-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately

marched her off to the police station.

In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of

brass and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat

man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his

ticket.

"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.

"You'll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.

Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something

scientific, amusing as well as instructive, illustrating the principles

of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one

shilling. Who?"

I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any

colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being

run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very

powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man,

almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a

skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious

pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The

skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective

purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a

"yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees' nest."

Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his

largest sized cap saying at once,--

"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."

At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.

"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own

cap. "Oh! ye needn't be afraid--I washed my hair last--year."

(Laughter.)

Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a

face you've got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why

not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"